I’m old enough to remember marveling at how powerful the 1968 Dodge Charger V8s were, ranging in horsepower (which was rated at SAE gross rather than SAE net hp prior to 1972) from 230 horsies from the 2-barrel version all the way up to 425 ponies in the 426ci Hemi. Torque, which in a muscle car was just as important (if not more so) as horsepower, also ran from 340 lb-ft up to 490 in the Hemi. Many a young man’s loins were set ablaze by the prospect of taming such a brute.
As if the prospect of bringing a wild Dodge Charger to heel weren’t enough, a 1970 Chevy Chevelle SS – considered by many aficionados to be the penultimate classic American muscle car of all time – could be had with a 454ci V8 rated at 450 hp and a quarter-mile drag strip time of 13.1 secs at 107 mph. In that era, such performance was considered to be scary good.
Mustangs, Camaros, Goats (Pontiac GTOs), 440 Magnums, “six-pack” carbs, Hurst, Holley, Moroso, Mopar, the Superbee, cherry bomb and glass pack mufflers, Hooker headers…you name it and the power was there for the serious gearhead as well as Saturday night boulevard cruiser.
Of course, early 70s smog controls, the first OPEC oil crunch in 1973 and an array of cultural and governmental changes soon came along and managed to kill off, for a time, the American muscle car. In 1975, for example, most Chevy Corvettes – which had once featured seriously powerful V8s – had been successfully neutered, thanks to the EPA, and came with V8 engines offering 165 horsepower and pokey 1/4-mile times. Compare that to the 1968 'Vette with the L71 427 V8 rated at 435 ponies and three 2-barrel carburetors, and it’s easy to glean additional meaning from Don McLean’s 1971 song “American Pie,” in which he lamented about things “heading in the wrong direction” (his words).
But just like you can’t keep a good man down, it’s also proven to be just as true that you can’t keep a good American muscle car down, at least not for more than a decade or so. By the early 1980s, American car makers were making their first tentative stabs at bringing back some muscle to their V8s – and it’s the V8 engine that defines the muscle car – though much of the initial attempt relied at least as much on marketing as on delivering any real displacement. And there’s no replacement for displacement, right?
Consider the 1969-70 Ford Mustang Boss 302 V8 engine. It put out 290 horsepower – which is fairly tame by today’s standards, when many V6 engines easily surpass that rating – and 290 lb-ft of torque. The Boss was an Everyman’s performance engine, at least for the original muscle car era. The powerplant could also be modified by most shade tree mechanics and the Blue Oval offered an array of performance parts, not to mention what could be had in the aftermarket. It was as welcoming to performance enthusiasts as a mom was welcoming to a son returning home safe from an Army stint in Vietnam back then.
Government bureaucrats and an ever-restrictive environmental regulatory rulebook soon conspired to end the Boss’s reign, however, and its once-ubiquitous presence within the Ford performance engine ranks, along with all those other hardy exemplars of Dearborn power and might, nearly went the way of the woolly mammoth, the drive-in movie theater and Raquel Welch and Ann Margret posters in teenage boys’ bedrooms. Fortunately for American motoring, such a dire circumstance turned out not to be permanent.
In 1982, the year in which Ford once again got serious about bringing some pep to its lineup of wheezer (for lack of a better word) V8s, it reintroduced American Muscle, rolling out its new version of the Boss 302 (that was its cubic inch displacement), the 5.0 liter HO (“High Output”) V8, a mill that Dearborn proudly boasted could deliver a lip-smacking 157 horsepower at 4,200 rpm along with a snappy 240 lb-ft of torque. I had one of those, plopping down $2,000 in down payment that year for a glossy black $10,000 Mustang GT with the four-speed manual transmission, Michelin TRX performance tires, performance alloy wheels, red vinyl interior, AM/FM stereo and NO air conditioning. I couldn’t have been more pleased with myself. The other V8 in the Mustang lineup and available in almost all model types delivered 111 horsepower and fairly nonexistent torque.
Since then, American auto manufacturers have only gotten bolder and smarter, finding new ways to pump out ever more ponies and torque from their V8s. Today, a Chevy Camaro and a Ford Mustang come standard with engines, even at the V6 level, that easily deliver 300-plus horsepower, and power from their V8s that finishes well north of 400 snorting stallions. Everywhere one looks, in fact, one sees muscle car options available from the Domestic Three (Ford, GM, FCA), and at horsepower/torque ratings that were relatively uncommon even back during Detroit’s late-60s/early-70s muscle car heyday.
Even American muscle car gas mileage is better, though “up to 15 mpg” in the city – in the 2017 Ford Mustang GT with the 5.0 liter, 435-hp Coyote V8 – is hardly something to shout about. Many such vehicles routinely deliver 25 miles per gallon or better on the highway. Don’t get me wrong: both those numbers are far better than the 8-10 mpg, at best, that the big-block muscle cars of the 1960s no doubt achieved. (Let’s not talk about gas prices, however, because I’d definitely love .25/gallon or so vice today’s $2.35 average, even at the hourly wage earned in 1970.)
Given all this golden goodness covering us with speed, speed, and more speed, what’s the best thing of all these days? That’s easy: the hands-down winner of the American muscle car horsepower wars, at least for the next couple years, has just arrived, and it’s a satanic beast: the Dodge Challenger SRT Demon, more simply known as the Dodge Demon.
This 840-horsepower monster is the fastest production car ever produced, for one, and it claims a 9.65-second 1/4-mile time at 140 mph. Many a gearhead has spent countless hours tuning his V8 to produce sub-10-second quarter-mile dragstrip times, and those still can’t come close to matching the Demon’s numbers right out of the box.
Of course, V8 muscle car power is produced these days using more sophisticated means than back in the original era, meaning today’s mills – including the Dodge Demon’s 6.2 liter engine – employ computer-controlled fuel injection and engine management systems more powerful than all the computers used to put humans on the Moon in 1969. Today’s muscle cars also ride better, stay stuck to the road better and come with far more creature comforts than we could imagine possible in 1970, or even 1982 – when I was happy to have manual windows and front seats, no cruise control or intermittent wipers, no tilt wheel and no rear window defrost in exchange for the $10,000 I paid for that Boss 302 Mustang GT.
Superchargers and turbochargers are also a regular part of the horsepower universe these days rather than three two-barrel (or even two four-barrel) carburetors and a giant rear axle set-up to handle the power transfer. The Demon’s supercharger is capable of sucking up more than 32,500 liters of air per minute at full bore and its high-flow fuel injectors, also operating at full power, can drink 1.36 gallons of 100-plus high-octane unleaded gas per minute when going full tilt. For comparison, your shower head puts out about two gallons every minute.
If you want to stick with commonly available pump gas of the 91 octane variety, the Demon engine’s management system will dial back horsepower to a relatively sedate 808 ponies and “only” 717 lb-feet of torque. Poor you.
Speaking non-hagiographically, speed has always come at a price, whether we’re talking about the late-1960s/early 1970s or today. The $10,000 I paid for that 1982 Ford Mustang GT with the Boss 302 V8 engine was a lot of money back then. The 1970 Chevelle SS with the 454 V8 engine would have set you back about $5,000, at a time when the average yearly salary was $6,186. The 2018 Dodge Demon will cost you $86,000. To be fair, you still get FCA’s five year/60,000 mile limited powertrain coverage. So you always have that going for you, which is nice.
Price will always factor into the decision when it comes to American Muscle, though it’s still quite often the case that such purchases are mostly emotional and not bottom-line focused choices. So it’s nice to know that even in today’s green-obsessed world – where screaming harridans of righteous social justice might busily point organic-food-stained accusing fingers at you just for the sin of merely wanting more than an econobox hybrid compact car – you can still climb into a Dodge Demon or a Chevy Camaro ZL-1 or a Ford Mustang Shelby GT500 Super Snake or any of a host of other high-performance American rides and let it ride, ride, ride (won’t you let it ride?). 
One of my brothers who is a mechanic was a 60s 70s gear head. I think that’s what they were called. Pretty sure he had a road runner. Actually 2 , one for parts and one to drive / race. Looked like this rig.
